346. How to Make Your Storage Portfolio "Bullet Proof" (Even in a Down Market)
Self Storage Income
AJ Osborne
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We survived 2008, the pandemic, high interest rates, and now a wildly volatile economy—but it’s not the same for other self storage owners. I’ve been getting calls over the last 6 months from operators losing their facilities, trying to restructure, and get out. They’ll lose money, lose their properties, and most likely lose the relationships with their banks, lenders, or investors.
This is how to not be in that position. This is how to become “hard to kill” in self storage.
What most investors don’t realize is that to thrive, you need first to survive—and this is exactly how to do it. I’ll share how much liquidity (cash reserves) you should have on-hand at all times, how to put your numbers over your emotion and never panic buy or sell, what to do when big competitors drop rates (by 50%!) in your market, and the playbook we used to build a $300M+ storage portfolio while everyone else was severely unprepared.
If you can stay in a strong position in 2026, you will have opportunities coming your way that won’t resurface for years.
What you’ll learn in today’s show:
- How to make your self storage portfolio “hard to kill” even by big competitors
- Cash reserves: how much you should keep in your accounts at all times
- How to survive the intense rate drops of big competitors (REITs) in your market
- Stop letting your emotions run your portfolio (this will lead you to lose money)
- What we did in 2008, 2020, and now 2026 to buy opportunities of a lifetime
- Preparing for maintenance costs, especially when you’re in the slow season
—
Grab AJ’s Book, Growing Wealth in Self-Storage 2.0 - https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Wealth-Self-Storage-2-0-Post-Pandemic/dp/1735258865
Why I Bought Self Storage in a Recession https://www.selfstorageincome.com/blog/why-i-bought-self-storage-in-a-recession
Self Storage Investing 101 https://www.selfstorageincome.com/blog/self-storage-investing-101
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I've had calls over the last six months with people that are losing their deals. |
| 0:05.0 | We've been through 2008, COVID, the high interest rate market, the cycles come and go. |
| 0:11.0 | It is part of investing. You can't take out the risk. So how do you prepare? |
| 0:17.0 | How do you put yourself in a good position for when those things come? Just make sure that |
| 0:23.0 | no matter what's going to happen, you've done as much as you possibly can to shield yourself, |
| 0:27.6 | your partners, your team from those elements that can and will destroy you. |
| 0:36.9 | Welcome everybody to self-storage income. |
| 0:41.2 | And today we're talking about survival, how to be hard to kill, how to last, which |
| 0:48.5 | allows you to grow, take advantage of the downsides and the upsides because you cannot control so much. You can only be prepared. |
| 0:58.0 | Mm-hmm. No, exactly right. And this is why we emphasize and focus so much on self-storage on that |
| 1:03.3 | micro-market, that micro-economic element of storage and how amazing those things are. But no matter what |
| 1:09.8 | we do with that micro market, |
| 1:11.4 | there are those factors that will, can, and do impact you that might be these macroeconomic |
| 1:18.5 | things. You know, it could be interest rates. It could be these things that we saw with |
| 1:21.9 | valuations, all this stuff. I mean, we've gone through all of it and excited for this episode |
| 1:27.2 | today to dive into some of those war stories, so to speak, and talk about this idea of being hard to kill. |
| 1:33.0 | It's so, so important that, you know, when we're looking at deals and we're underwriting, I need to start reframing this. |
| 1:39.7 | Like, you never look at deals, you look at opportunities because deals are made, right? |
| 1:43.2 | So, like, I got to stop saying deals. So when we're looking at opportunities, when we're underwriting, when we're looking at markets, we've got to buffer all these things in there. A prime example that I like to share with people just first and foremost is occupancies. You know, a lot of times you see in people's underwriting that they underwrite for 10% vacancy. You're like, well, you're just going to bank on your facility being 90% occupied all the |
| 2:05.9 | time. That's a really, really dangerous expectation, especially, again, in our experience, I mean, |
| 2:12.8 | we've seen stabilized assets go from 85 plus percent occupancy to below 70 in certain markets and things. |
| 2:20.3 | So those things do happen. |
... |
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